Vito Acconci, performance and video artist, has created seminal works of art in the truest sense of the word. Particularly considering his most notorious performance, "Seedbed" (1971), which involved Acconci masturbating on the Sonnabend Gallery floor. For "Seedbed" Acconci performed beneath...
[more]Vito Acconci, performance and video artist, has created seminal works of art in the truest sense of the word. Particularly considering his most notorious performance, "Seedbed" (1971), which involved Acconci masturbating on the Sonnabend Gallery floor. For "Seedbed" Acconci performed beneath a sloped, triangular wooden platform, while gallery visitors walked above him and listened as he fantasized aloud. However, the jacking off performance was only the seed of something that would grow into a prolific, complex, enduring, and widely varying body of work that ranged from performance art to video to installation to sculpture to Public art and landscape architecture.
Acconci's work has been most predominantly informed by his early years spent as a writer and poet. In fact, his general lack of skill in the visual arts prompted his initial exploration of conceptual art: "When my career as an artist began, it was a godsend to me that it was the time of Conceptual art; otherwise, I would have had nowhere to go, nothing to do."
His most groundbreaking work always concerns action, space, and relationships. Even now, his pioneering video work from the 1970s feels fresh and substantial. The 1974 "Plot" (shown again in 1998 at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York) divides the gallery floor into ten chapters of a book, with titles such as "The Exploding Letter" and "Shrunken City." Voice-overs and images on surrounding screens add mystery, rather than an expected clarity.
"Adaptable Wall Bra" (1990) consists of a gargantuan brassiere made of stiff steel mesh with plaster cups suspended from the gallery walls and ceiling by steel cables. Viewers walk into one of the cups and enter an inviting womb of lights and softly playing music. The result is a refreshing and humorous jumble of metaphors concerning comfort, warmth, pleasure, and sex.
More recently, Acconci is actualizing his ideas regarding sense and meaning in space by building installations and structures in public settings. Thus, establishing a reconsideration of our language of environment by blending the spatial categories of fine art and landscape architecture.
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